Mathematics Education Research in India

Mathematics Education Research in India is present at various institutes, not in an autonomous form but as part of education departments at the Universities and research centres set up by the government at state and district levels. The research that takes place at these institutions mainly focused on remedial material and teaching in the past, the trends are changing in the contmporary times. Banerjee (2012) provides a overview of mathematics education research in India.

A large number of research studies in India have focused on designing diagnostic tests in order to identify learning difficulties in some content area or the other and standardizing them. These studies in general are followed by remedial teaching… The thesis, reports or abstracts available describing these attempts do not give very specific insights into the test items, the approach adopted for remedial teaching or illustration of students’ understanding of any concept or idea. Largely, the tests led to the identification of difficulties students face in learning various ideas in mathematics, and the remedial teaching produced significant difference in students’ performances.

Over the years, however, we do see some change in this paradigm of research, especially in some studies after the year 2000. These studies/approaches are more analytical in nature, make efforts to understand the teaching or the learning process through designs of study other than experimental methods. Incidentally, many conferences focusing on science, technology and mathematics education have been held around this time in the country.

Following are some prominent representations across India presented theme wise.